The sliding surface of a bearing applied to the engine of a vehicle is required to have high abrasion resistance and seizing resistance. As one of solutions to this requirement, a technique has been proposed in which the sliding surface of a bearing is coated with a resin composition (see Patent Documents 1 and 2).
In this technique disclosed in these prior art literatures, a layer of a resin composition is formed by coating the inner peripheral surface (sliding surface) of a semi-cylindrical base material layer with the resin composition.
Such a sliding resin composition (hereinafter, sometimes simply referred to as “resin composition”) contains a resin binder, a solid lubricant, and protecting and reinforcing particles. When a load is applied to the resin composition, the solid lubricant itself is deformed (e.g., cleaved), more specifically, slip occurs between its crystal planes so that the stress of the resin composition is relaxed (Patent Document 1). On the other hand, for example, nano-ordered silica particles (20 to 50 nm in diameter) are used as the protecting and reinforcing particles to improve the abrasion resistance of the entire resin composition (Patent Document 2).
Refer to Patent Documents 3 to 5 as other prior art literatures that disclose techniques relating to the present invention.